1st North Dakota Infantry

🏛️The era

In 1916, the U.S.-Mexico border was tense. Mexico was in the middle of a long and violent revolution, and fighting sometimes spilled across the line. In March 1916, forces under Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico. The United States sent a punitive expedition into Mexico, and that summer President Woodrow Wilson called National Guard units from across the country into federal service to guard the border.

That is how a regiment from North Dakota ended up in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. Thousands of Guardsmen came from states far from the border, and many had never seen anything like the Valley's heat, palms, and farm fields. Camps sprang up along the river, and towns like Mercedes suddenly found themselves hosting soldiers from the northern plains.

The border mobilization turned out to be a rehearsal. By the spring of 1917, the United States was entering World War I. Many of the Guard units that had drilled in South Texas were soon headed to France, now better trained and better organized because of their time on the border.

👥People & events

The marker honors 1,007 officers and enlisted men of the 1st North Dakota Infantry, North Dakota National Guard, who camped in this area from 1916 to 1917. Their regiment was older than the state of North Dakota. It was organized in 1883 as the 1st Dakota Infantry, back in territorial days, and renamed the 1st North Dakota Infantry in 1885.

Its federal service started well before the border. The regiment served in the Spanish-American War and in the fighting that followed in the Philippines, 1898 to 1899. After its border duty, it was redesignated the 164th Infantry and went to France with the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I.

Its most famous chapter came in World War II. As part of the Americal Division, the 164th Infantry fought in the Pacific. The marker records that on 13 October 1942, at Guadalcanal, the regiment became the first United States Army component to take the offensive in the war. These were citizen-soldiers from North Dakota farms and towns, fighting in the jungles of the Solomon Islands.

The regiment's service continued after that. During the Korean conflict it served at Camp Rucker, Alabama, from 1951 to 1953. In 1955 it was converted to the 164th Engineer Group of the North Dakota National Guard. The monument went up on 7 April 1960, more than forty years after the men camped here.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The story of this one regiment covers a big stretch of American history. It started in Dakota Territory, when the northern plains were still being settled. Over the next seventy years, its men served in the Caribbean and the Philippines, on the Mexican border, in France, and in the South Pacific. Few things show America's rise from a continental nation to a global power as clearly as one unit's list of campaigns.

The 1916 border mobilization was also a turning point for the National Guard. Calling up state units from across the country exposed problems with equipment, training, and organization. Fixing those problems helped prepare the Guard to become a major part of the forces the U.S. sent to World War I. The camp at Mercedes was part of that hard schooling.

Guadalcanal was one of the key campaigns of the Pacific War. It was the first major American offensive against Japan, and the struggle there lasted for months. The fact that Guardsmen from North Dakota fought in it, as part of the first Army forces to go on the attack, reminds us how much the country relied on its citizen-soldiers in that war.

🧭If you visit

This monument is in Mercedes, in the heart of the Lower Rio Grande Valley. The landscape here is flat and green, with farm fields, palm-lined roads, and the warm, humid air of deep South Texas. Try to imagine how strange it must have felt to soldiers from North Dakota, who knew prairie winters and wheat fields, to pitch their tents here more than a century ago.

The monument dates from 1960, and its text reads like a regimental record, listing the unit's history from territorial days to the Cold War. Take your time with it. Each line stands for a different generation of soldiers and a different part of the world, and the name changes trace the history of the American military itself.

Mercedes is an easy stop on a drive through the Valley, which has other sites connected to the border's long and complicated history. Pairing this monument with a visit to the Rio Grande itself helps make sense of why so many troops were sent here in 1916. Please be respectful of the monument and its surroundings.